Late last night (CET), we reported on the story that the VLC project needed more developers for the Mac version of this popular video player, or else the Mac variant may disappear. Just about every website out there reported on this issue, but it turns out it all got a bit exaggerated (on the internet? Surely you jest...). We spoke to VLC developer Pierre d'Herbemont to clarify the issue, and they've also put up a wiki page about the so-called demise of the Mac version of VLC. He also detailed what, exactly, they meant by "Apple is blocking us".

I wonder if that really matters for a media player. Media players really require UI's quite far removed from the usual routine of "File Edit View Search Tools" anyway. For example in Gnome, Totem blends in seemlessly with the desktop... but feels like a text editor that's been modified to be a media player. VLC clashes a bit with the HID and is as overly-busy as any KDE app. But for a media player, I think that's probably appropriate.

By the same token, tho, iTunes, say, manages to simultaneously have probably the best media-player interface around, and to look very "mac." (With the disclaimers that I am not an iTunes user, I do not have a high opinion of it, I don't even own a damned Mac, I use VLC continuously and love it, etc.) Rhythmbox, for that matter, is a not-awesome-but-good-enough media player, with a perfectly usable (with an amusingly iTunes-like) interface that fits in quite nicely with Gnome. So it is at least possible to have something that's simultaneously a good UI for a media player, and a UI that's consistent with the rest of the environment.